The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam attracts 1.3 million people annually. Yet, as The New York Times reports, some visitors, especially younger and foreign tourists, have limited knowledge about the Holocaust. One misinformed teen from Ontario, for instance, asked her friends if Frank hid Jews.
Even if attendees lack information about the atrocities of World War II, or even about who Frank was, the museum at the famous diarist’s home is doing something right: avoiding what Yale University historian Timothy Snyder calls “memorial culture”—a way of commemorating the Holocaust that privileges the act of remembrance itself over the specificity of historical details.